Currents Critique

The method of telling this piece works well to accomplish the feeling that anything can happen ending with the beginning, “a simple summer day” and climaxing with the recovery of a drowning boy.  Although I like the style and understand the short sections provide limitations, the opening seems disjointed- jumping from Gary to Josey to the granddaughters. Even the granddaughters referred to as seals threw me off. The elements of innocence and death are intertwined in the detail that “his was the first hand she’d ever held” paralleled with the hand of the dead child in the next section, bouncing with the stretcher. I do wonder about the logic of putting a drowned boy on a stretcher as that is reminiscent of an ambulance, but he’s already dead. I like the backwardness even in the section about the discovery of the body- “at first he mistook it for seaweed.” The detail of where the girls were before the climax is a nice detail. The description of the lifeguard as “torpid” is a bit undeveloped, perhaps implying something about authority. Even the detail of the drowned boy’s brother as Filipino says something about races banding together in times of hardship, perhaps. All of the characters are related through the discovery of the boy, creating an interesting web. I think it’d be an interesting plot to have these character’s lives intersect again at some other point in time. But as a short and not-so-sweet piece this works well.